“It will be all right. I’m on my way to Jenny as we speak—I’ll tell you the story next time we talk. Call me and let me know when you’ve got the lights back on and give me an update on Edith.” He didn’t give her the opportunity to hesitate again. “Good-bye, love.”
His thoughts purified quickly. The happiness that stemmed from tiny adjustments of the rearview mirror, the sharp turns he continued to handle, was large and flexible. The diffuse uncertainty of his predicament washed gently, like a tide eating slowly at firmly packed sand.
SITTING IN THE DARK WITH EDITH, holding her hand, listening to her breath try and fail to determine a rhythm, Adeleine attempted to think of her condition as others saw it. As though considering a photo taken without her knowledge, she turned it, held it up to light to reveal some previously invisible element of herself. Had Thomas considered just how opportunely the arrangement had developed, the cheap punch line of an agoraphobe taking up with someone just across the hall? Did he see her affections as paltry for how little they traveled, how rarely they were tested? She had navigated the situation far too casually, she thought, had allowed her proximity and availability to stand as an ersatz reproduction of commitment. She may as well have said, Yes, I’ll keep welcoming you in. I’ll stay, but how much that has to do with you and me is a little murky.
On the phone she had wanted to say, My pillows are losing the scent you left, but she had only moaned about her various inconveniences and inabilities, added to the tentacled shape of all that required his fixing. There hadn’t been any way to tell him, that week in early March when he came down with the flu in her apartment, how much it had meant to drag a damp cloth across his face, to fetch tea and watch him wrap his hand around its warm comfort.
Instead of closing the conversation with an assurance of love or even faith, she had only absorbed his instructions, sat on them for a day before following them downstairs. The bill was right where he’d said it would be, the phone number in bold. She had picked up the cracked plastic cordless phone, and she had dialed.
—
EDITH WAS THE WORD Adeleine pushed out of her mouth slowly; what she’d intended to say—Help—had died somewhere on its escape. The shadowed suggestions of both their bodies, Edith’s flattened against the bed and Adeleine’s drawn close to her on a nearby chair, stretched across the room when cars passed, threatening to disintegrate. Adeleine liked the idea of confessing to Edith, the guarantee that nothing she mentioned would be long considered or captured.
“I haven’t left the house in more than six months. The closest I came was standing in the foyer when the ambulance came for you, and even that made me feel like I was in the mountains with not enough air.
“I used to be better. Brunches on Sundays with other hungover people in sunglasses. Parties—crowded ones. I always knew the corner store guy. The last one gave me boxes when I moved and kissed my cheek.”
The last fact was too much: the shared kindnesses she’d once enjoyed now only measurements of how she’d deteriorated. She leaned hard against the rigid wicker and pushed away images of herself balancing a grocery bag on her hip while she stopped to pet an acquaintance’s dog, biting her lip while she listened to a neighbor’s story of a hellish Christmas. The truth of her life came from her easily now, and she was freed to speak into the room that was not empty of love but also not quite listening.
“Edith? Thomas is so good to me. I’m worried I can’t or won’t be what he needs, or that he’ll leave me if I don’t get better. And that he’s with me so he can keep hiding from the rest of his life.”
“Oh, June. My sister.”
Edith reached her hand, which appeared as rough and inflexible as reef, towards Adeleine’s and covered it. She spoke calmly, as though reciting a multiplication table, facts that would never become less true.
“It’s not your job to say why someone loves you, is it?”
Adeleine, eyes wide, sniffed and shook her head. “No?”
“And you’ll never see the way your skeletons can dance. Not if you keep them to yourself. You’ve gotta let those bones twist!” Even in the dimness, Adeleine could make out true delight, the glint of silver-crowned molars as Edith smiled.
Edith’s grip tightened, and Adeleine watched the slack, spent skin on her arm collect as the muscles beneath it contracted.
“Now,” she instructed—Adeleine heard a woman who facilitated long-term plans and kept appointments—“come lie down here, next to me. You need your sleep after a long trip like that.”